What would anyone do?

By By Peter St. Onge / The Charlotte Observer

Published: Monday, December 10, 2012 at 01:20 PM.

You’re on a
New York City
subway platform. You’re hunched over your smartphone, your iPad, your tabloid newspaper when suddenly, a man is on the tracks. Is he crazy? Was he pushed? You step backward instinctively. You look for someone to step forward. You hear the rumble of an approaching train.

What would you do?

On Monday afternoon, at a subway stop in Midtown Manhattan, an agitated man shoved a 58-year-old stranger onto the track of an oncoming train. At least one person reacted, lifting his camera to take a picture of the victim, Ki-Suck Han. The photo, which appeared in horrifying tastelessness on the cover of the next day’s New York Post, shows Han trying to climb out moments before the train killed him.

Also striking: There’s not another person in sight.

What would you do?

We don’t know. At least I don’t. I imagine myself wanting to help Ki-Suck Han, and I imagine being afraid to. I imagine wishing for the calm certainty of the right thing, but seeing the train’s urgency and ...

Others seem less unsure. Monday’ death was followed by a quick and inevitable wave of outrage. Some of it was the usual piety of anonymous online commenters, and a lot of it was directed at the photographer and the newspaper editors who published his photo. But in a headline the next day, the New York Times wondered of everyone else: “Were there no heroes?” A USA Today editorial decried: “A dearth of heroes.” Anderson Cooper blamed a society engaged more with its electronic devices than each other.

You’re on a New York City subway platform. You’re hunched over your smartphone, your iPad, your tabloid newspaper when suddenly, a man is on the tracks. Is he crazy? Was he pushed? You step backward instinctively. You look for someone to step forward. You hear the rumble of an approaching train.

What would you do?

On Monday afternoon, at a subway stop in Midtown Manhattan, an agitated man shoved a 58-year-old stranger onto the track of an oncoming train. At least one person reacted, lifting his camera to take a picture of the victim, Ki-Suck Han. The photo, which appeared in horrifying tastelessness on the cover of the next day’s New York Post, shows Han trying to climb out moments before the train killed him.

Also striking: There’s not another person in sight.

What would you do?

We don’t know. At least I don’t. I imagine myself wanting to help Ki-Suck Han, and I imagine being afraid to. I imagine wishing for the calm certainty of the right thing, but seeing the train’s urgency and ...

Others seem less unsure. Monday’ death was followed by a quick and inevitable wave of outrage. Some of it was the usual piety of anonymous online commenters, and a lot of it was directed at the photographer and the newspaper editors who published his photo. But in a headline the next day, the New York Times wondered of everyone else: “Were there no heroes?” A USA Today editorial decried: “A dearth of heroes.” Anderson Cooper blamed a society engaged more with its electronic devices than each other.

It’s easy to judge — and it seems we do so more than ever, prodded by entertainment and media that provide us a bottomless supply of both villains and victims to scorn. We’re oh-so-willing to contribute, gleefully feeding the worst in each other by hitting “send” on thoughts that never used to reach our lips, let alone escape out the front doors of our homes.

Smugness, of course, is not a new phenomenon, and media have long been adept at making others’ misery a product for consumption. But it feels as if our flaws are on such constant parade now that we haven’t the inclination to do anything but shake our heads and move on.

So let’s pause on this one. Did you know the subway photographer was actually a freelance journalist on his way to an assignment? R. Umar Assabi said he did the instinctive thing when he saw Han on the tracks — he reached for his camera gear. He also says he couldn’t reach Han in the half-minute or so before he was killed, so he ran toward the train clicking his camera so its flash might alert the driver. Would you be less skeptical of that story if you learned Assabi approached police detectives afterward, offered to share his photos, and went with them to the Post to look at what his camera produced? Those don’t seem to be the actions of a man shamed by his inaction.

As for the rest of the people on the platform? I asked Leonard Terry about them.

Two years ago, on a cold Tuesday in January, Terry had just come back from the gym when he looked out his Ballantyne area apartment window in Charlotte and saw a 9-year-old girl walking on ice toward the middle of the apartment complex pond. The ice had formed from days of freezing temperatures, but it was thin.

Terry opened the door to his balcony. He didn’t see any parents. “I sat down in panic,” he said. “I knew I couldn’t swim.” The girl fell in. He thought about closing his blinds. He thought about dying. Then he thought this: “I’m going to have to live with not doing anything.”

He reached the girl about 30 feet from shore, but as he leaned down and grabbed her, the ice broke and he fell in. He bobbed under the surface three times with the girl on his back before another man, Mark McCullagh, crawled along the ice and pulled them out. Terry and McCullagh were honored in September for their heroism by the Carnegie Foundation.

This week, Terry thought about the subway death and the people who watched it. “I’m not sure,” he says. The train was approaching. There was little time to sort through the chaos in your head. “Everybody gets paralyzed,” he says. “I was paralyzed, too.”

What would you do?

“I don’t know,” he says. Most of us don’t. Maybe the best we can do is celebrate the ones who somehow find the right answer.